Lyric discussion by DavidGrimmer 

Cover art for Exquisite Dead Guy lyrics by They Might Be Giants

Actually, the lyric comes from a word game called "the exquisite corpse." People take turns writing one word of a sentence, without knowing what word came before, resulting in really weird and surreal turns of phrase. I know of nobody who actually sits around in their living rooms playing parlor games like this, but a lot of writers like to imagine that there are people who do.

Actually, there are people who still play Exquisite Corpse. My friends and I play it. Granted we don't call it Exquisite Corpse. We call it "Edible Lime" instead...one of my friends doesn't like the original name and thinks it's disturbing, so I changed it to something weird for her. But we still play it. We take turns passing a paper with part of something we've written on it and read the often humorous results. In that way it ends up being rather like Mad Libs but with stuff we made up all on our own. (It was especially fun playing...